Gaming the system: G.B. Joyce turns from sportswriting to a crime novel

G.B. Joyce sits in a booth at the back of TKO’s, an affectionately grubby sports bar on Toronto’s Danforth he’s been frequenting for a quarter century. The TV hanging near the front window is broadcasting a repeat of last night’s L.A.-Washington tilt. Framed illustrations of the Original Six NHL arenas hang below three photographs of the old Maple Leaf Gardens, before you could find diapers in aisle seven. It’s 3:30 in the afternoon, and the pub is empty except for a row of regulars nursing pints and catching up on neighbourhood gossip. The radio, blaring Dire Straits, encourages them to do the Walk of Life.

“This is basically the Merry Widow,” says Joyce, referring to the watering hole in his debut novel The Code, which sits on the table between us. “Nick the bartender at the Merry Widow is Nick here. And Polo. Polo is absolutely real.”

The book’s front cover says G.B., but the man in front of me is Gare Joyce, one of the country’s best-known sportswriters. He’s covered leagues both minor and major, worked as an ink-stained newspaper reporter and an award-winning magazine features writer, and for the last eight years, served as ESPN’s man in Toronto. Last year, he published two books (The Devil and Bobby Hull and Team Canada, a look at Hockey Canada’s last 30 years) and left ESPN for Rogers’ Sportsnet magazine, where he now serves as features editor. He also completed The Code, which is in stores this month.

“I first took a stab at a novel 30 years ago,” he says, forking another bite of mac and cheese, one of the kitchen’s daily specials, into his mouth. “I have a drawer full of ’em.”

There’s the fictional memoir of a junior hockey player recovering from a concussion — he wrote that one a decade ago, before the current pandemic. There’s a novel for children, about a strongman who breaks from the circus and raises a bear with his family in Northern Ontario. There’s a collection of sports-centric short stories he eventually plans to finish, one of which, “John Brisker’s Greatest Game,” appeared in ESPN The Magazine last year.

“He can write about absolutely anything and make it fascinating,” says his editor, Nick Garrison. “The way he understands human nature, the way he can see a story in anything, made me think that facts might just be holding him back.”

The two first worked together on 2006’s When The Lights Went Out, about the bench-clearing brawl between Soviet and Canadian players at the 1987 World Junior Championship. When Garrison joined Penguin Canada, he pitched Joyce the idea of a novel, and, eventually, asked for a 15,000-word sample. “I think the next day he had 5,000 words in my inbox,” Garrison says. “And then the next day there were 10,000.”

“I fall out of bed writing,” says Joyce, who is already at work on a sequel, The Black Ace, which will be published next year.

The Code tells the story of Brad Shade, a washed-up NHLer who skated around the league for a few years, fell on hard times, and eventually reinvented himself as a scout, trolling the minor leagues for the next can’t miss prospect. The night he’s invited to play in an old-timers game in Peterborough, a crotchety Hall of Fame coach turns up dead. Shade, who happens to be scouting the dead coach’s star player, figures he might as well solve the murder at the same time he does his job. Joyce, who spent a year working as a scout while researching 2007’s Future Greats and Heartbreaks, sees similarities between the professions.

“It’s basically identical to police investigative work,” he says. “I made the point of making that even plainer — having the protagonist as a former criminology student, and the son of a cop, and a former private investigator.”

Hockey’s minor leagues, which Joyce covered for the Ottawa Citizen in the late ’90s, are the perfect setting for a crime novel; a strange ecosystem inhabited by puck bunnies, cutthroat agents, career scouts, players on the cusp of stardom and those about to see their dreams fizzle out.

“It’s an unusual culture, or subculture,” he says. “The boulevard of broken dreams. And the only ones with prospects are too young to appreciate it. A lot of damaged people going in, and a lot more coming out. And I mean tragically so.”

Shade is himself a damaged man. Far from perfect, he’s an occasional philanderer and frequent rule-breaker, more concerned with keeping his job than solving the murder. It’s somewhat surprisingly, then, to hear Joyce say “there’s a fair bit of me in there. It’s like the old Ross Macdonald line: ‘I’m not him, but he’s me.’

“In the line of work, I’ve probably erased lines a bit,” Joyce admits. “I’ve tried to keep one foot inbounds, anyways. But if you play a game, it’s about playing up to and maybe slightly beyond the rules.

“I love gaming the system,” he says. “That’s what sports is about.”

• The Code by G.B. Joyce is published by Viking ($30)

The best games he can name

We asked G.B. Joyce, author of The Code, to share some of his favourite sports novels

Bang The Drum Slowly, by Mark Harris

The best in a series of novels about Henry Wiggin, a pitcher with New York Mammoths ballclub. Written in the first person, Wiggin as the worldly and world-weary narrator was a model for me with The Code.

The Professional, by W.C. Heinz; The Harder They Fall, by Budd Schulberg; Fat City, by Leonard Gardner

Boxing provides the best canvas for the novelist because of the violence and desperation. Adding to the richness is the fact that it’s s the filthiest business in the dirty world of sport.

A Fan’s Notes, by Frederick Exley

Booze and sport go hand in hand. Fandom crosses over to obsession, in this case an obsession with Frank Gifford long before Kathy Lee came along. Like Bang the Drum Slowly, A Fan’s Notes is written in the first person but the narrator, an only slightly fictionalized Ex, is doomed.

North Dallas Forty, by Peter Gent

Gent’s take on the brutality of the game and, particularly, the business of pro football, was informed and validated by his career with the Dallas Cowboys. A shot across the bow of his former employers, one that knocked off Tom Landry’s fedora.

You Know Me, Al, by Ring Lardner

Every dressing room has a rube — why should it be like any other room? But the letters from the ballplaying naif in bygone days to his best friend are nostalgic and still hilarious. Now it would be “U No Me” and a string of tweets.